1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to enhanced search engine techniques, and more specifically a method and apparatus for enhancing and optimizing enterprise search.
2. Description of the Related Art
Search techniques have been developed that allow a user to enter search terms into a browser and send those search terms to a search engine. The search engine may evaluate the search terms against an index and produce a list of results. Typically, the results provide a list of web pages that contain the search terms. A ranking algorithm is then used to order the results in such a way that the first results listed might be the “best” results that include the search terms. One well-known example is ordering the results based on the number of links associated with each result. After the search results are ordered, the ordered results are returned and displayed on a web browser.
One problem with this approach is that often times newer, more relevant search results are ranked lower than older results because these pages have less links associated with them, although the newer search results may be more popular or more relevant at the current time. Another disadvantage is that a user might enter a search query which produces many pages of search results. Then, the user must sort through many results in order to find what is relevant for that particular user. The results returned may be ordered in terms of popularity of all users as a whole and not tailored to any kind of subgroup of users or to the needs of that particular user.
Accordingly, what is needed is a technique for producing search results that are ranked such that the results that are most relevant to the particular user may be found at the top of the ranked list of search results.